Already Pardoned, Jan. 6 Rioters Push for Compensation

The rioters who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, secured a shocking double victory this year.

President Trump granted them clemency for their crimes on his first day back in the White House, and in the months that followed, he allowed his Justice Department to purge many of the federal agents and prosecutors who sought to hold them accountable.

But even though the president has given the rioters their freedom and has taken steps toward satisfying their desire for retribution, they are asking for more. In the past several weeks, the rioters and their lawyers have pushed the Trump administration to pay them restitution for what they believe were unfair prosecutions.

On Thursday, one of the lawyers, Mark McCloskey, said during a public meeting on social media that he had recently met with top officials at the Justice Department and pitched them on a plan to create a special panel that would dole out financial damages to the rioters — much like the arrangement of a special master to award money to the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The panel, which Mr. McCloskey called a “voluntary nonjudicial resolution committee,” would consider rioters’ cases individually, he said, then assign them sums according to harms they had purportedly suffered at the hands of the federal government.

Mr. McCloskey said that he wanted the panel to be overseen by Jeanine Pirro, who runs the federal prosecutors’ office in Washington that took the lead in filing charges against nearly 1,600 rioters who joined in the Capitol attack.

“The only thing I can do as your lawyer,” he told the rioters who were at the online meeting, “is to turn your losses into dollar bills.” (...)

Mr. McCloskey, who rose to prominence five years ago after he pointed an AR-15-style rifle at social justice protesters outside his home in St. Louis, has been leading the efforts to secure restitution for the rioters since at least March, when he announced that he and another lawyer, Peter Ticktin, a former classmate and longtime ally of Mr. Trump’s, were planning to sue the government. (...)

During the online meeting last week, Mr. McCloskey acknowledged that he and Mr. Ticktin had also run into “significant difficulties” in pursuing legal action on behalf of the rioters.

He acknowledged that there could be problems following through on his initial plan to file cases under the Federal Tort Claims Act, which allows individuals to sue the government for injuries caused by federal employees. He also said it could be challenging to overcome the two-year statute of limitations on bringing tort claims against the government for things that happened nearly five years ago.

But Mr. McCloskey assured the rioters that they had allies inside Mr. Trump’s Justice Department. Chief among them, he said, was Ed Martin, who runs the so-called weaponization working group, a body that was created to investigate those who investigated Jan. 6 and other people whom Mr. Trump perceives to be his enemies.

“He’s 100 percent on our side,” Mr. McCloskey said of Mr. Martin.

Mr. Trump’s grant of clemency to the Jan. 6 defendants was one of the most remarkable uses of presidential mercy in modern history. But also remarkable is the extent to which many of the rioters have remained unsatisfied by the measure, as well as by the subsequent firings and demotions of more than two dozen federal prosecutors and F.B.I. agents who worked on Capitol riot cases.

On Saturday, for example, Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys who was freed by Mr. Trump from a 22-year prison term stemming from Jan. 6, posted what amounted to a list of demands to the administration in a social media message. Among the things he called for were compensation for the rioters “for their suffering and that of their families” and the firing of “everyone involved” in the riot cases.

“If this isn’t done,” Mr. Tarrio wrote, “we will all hang together.”

On Sunday, another rioter, Ryan Nichols, a former Marine who was sentenced to more than five years in prison for joining a crowd that shoved at officers in a tunnel outside the Capitol, doubled down on his attacks against the police in a post on social media.

“I’d do it again given the same situation,” Mr. Nichols said of attacking officers. “They attacked Americans and killed innocent protesters.” He added that “we should have” dragged foes “through the streets.” (...)

One rioter, Shane Jenkins, who was sentenced to 84 months in prison for assaulting an officer and shattering a window at the Capitol with a tomahawk on Jan. 6, spoke during the online meeting and captured the spirit of loss and disillusionment that many of the pardoned defendants seem to feel.

Mr. Jenkins compared the rioters to the biblical story of the Israelites who were enslaved and then released by God from bondage in Egypt, only to roam for decades through the desert.

“Through Trump, God pardoned us and set us free, right?” Mr. Jenkins said. “Well, then what did they do? They wandered around the desert for 40 years and I don’t think very many of them got to see the Promised Land.”

“I just feel,” he went on, “like that’s kind of where we’re at right now.”

by Alan Feuer, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Nathan Howard/Getty Images
[ed. Missed this bit of stupidity when it came out but the smell eventually became unavoidable (like stepping on a dog turd). Courts already sent these assholes to the Promised Land once, but the Don broke them free. Now this is the thanks he gets? Speaking of stupidity (so much, so little time) remember the Cracker Barrel 'controversy' a few weeks ago? Conservative cancel culture (CCC, not KKK, although...) went apoplectic over corporate wokeness, old time values and something or other. In a logo. Anyway, ever wonder how and why this became a thing? Here you go (WSJ) - Sardar Biglari, activist investor, competitor, hedge fund manager with an axe to grind and an army of credulous MAGA idiots. Truth doesn't stand a chance these days. See also: Sure, Let’s Try Bribes! (Atlantic):]

***

Last year Tom Homan, the border czar, was allegedly recorded accepting $50,000 in cash in a bag (specifically, a bag from CAVA, the Mediterranean fast-casual chain) from undercover FBI agents posing as government contractors in a sting operation, in which Homan intimated that he would now try to steer DHS contracts their way. And then they … let him hang onto the cash, to see what he would do with it. Maybe nothing! Maybe report it to the IRS in a really scrupulous way!

When the Trump administration took over, it dropped the case. FBI Director Kash Patel even said that there was “no evidence of wrongdoing.” Homan also denies doing anything wrong. Remember, a wad of money in a weird bag intended for food only looks like a bribe, as a City Hall adviser recently explained. 

Alaska’s Future Is No Brighter Than America’s Future

I recently read Lisa Murkowski‘s book “Far From Home.” Whether you agree or disagree with her politically, I recommend reading her book. It reminded me of — and taught me more about — many important episodes in Alaska’s and America’s history, such as her primary loss to Joe Miller; her successful write-in campaign; the prosecution, conviction, exoneration and death of Ted Stevens; the Kavanaugh Supreme Court appointment; and the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Throughout the book, Murkowski emphasizes that, like her mentor Stevens and her long-time colleague Don Young, she has always wanted to do “what’s best for Alaska.” Her priority has always been to work for Alaska-focused goals she cares about, such as federal funding for the state’s needs and enabling Alaska resource development. In the first chapter, she writes: “I have one overriding purpose in the Senate: to get things done for Alaskans.” In the last chapter, she writes: “Addressing Alaskans’ challenges is more important to me than who wins elections or which party holds power, and certainly more important than what anyone thinks of me. I have to continue working with my colleagues, and to work with President Trump, as I work with whoever is president, because these people are relying on me.”

Of course, we want our congressional delegation to get things done for Alaskans and address Alaskans’ challenges. But the most important priority for Alaska is no longer federal funding or resource development. The most important thing Sen. Murkowski can do for Alaska is to help stop President Trump from systematically tearing down our American Constitution, our institutions and our norms.

We’re not just Alaskans: we’re Americans. Alaska’s future is no brighter than America’s future. No amount of funding and resource development will be worth it if we lose our American constitution, our democracy, the rule of law and our freedoms.

The illegal, corrupt, and incompetent actions of this administration threaten the lives, prosperity and freedom of Alaskans. Alaskans will die if the mRNA vaccine, which could save us from the next pandemic, is never developed. We will be less safe — and at greater risk of war — if we continue to trash our long-time alliances and show Putin, Xi and other dictators that we won’t stand up to their aggression. Our Alaska economy will suffer as Trump’s illegal, impulsive and stupid tariffs raise our prices — and our critical export markets retaliate with tariffs of their own. Our Alaska industries will suffer if increasingly blatant corruption makes contributing to the president’s inauguration and flattering his ego the most important factors in whether they get tariff exemptions and regulatory relief — or get shut down. We will never get a natural gas pipeline — or any long-term foreign investment — if other countries realize that their investments set them up for economic blackmail by a U.S. president who can’t be trusted.

Alaskans will suffer if we lose our freedom of speech and anyone who dares to write something like this can be called a crazy leftist lunatic who hates America — and be fired for writing it. Drip by drip, we will all suffer if the dignity of the presidency and our country continue to be eroded by an illiterate and profane president who communicates by tweet and can’t stop bragging about himself. And how will it feel to live in a country where masked thugs can grab long-time contributing members of our community off the street and send them to concentration camps–as is already starting to happen in Alaska?

Regardless of what you think of some of Sen. Murkowski’s votes, she clearly recognizes the threats Trump poses to America, and what needs to be done. About the 2016 election campaign, she wrote “. . . Within months, most Republicans would be afraid of challenging his offensive remarks. We gave him that power to destroy norms by failing to stand up to him from the start.” She has had more courage to stand up to him than most of her colleagues. I hope she will recognize that standing up to Trump — and for the powers of Congress — is now the most important thing she can do for Alaska. Anything she can do in Congress for Alaska — starting with any funding or legislation for Alaska — will be meaningless if the president can ignore the budgets and legislation passed by Congress.

As for Sen. Sullivan and Rep. Begich, it’s far past time for you to start standing up for the Constitution you swore to uphold by standing up to this president’s blatantly unconstitutional actions.

by Gunnar Knapp, Anchorage Daily News |  Read more:

Image: Yereth Rosen, Alaska Beacon

[ed. Her hand-wringing, faux moderate anguish on every policy issue of importance (in which she eventually capitulates after garnering maximum attention) - like her friend Susan Collins of Maine - has greatly exceeded its expiration date. As for her Alaskan collegues (Dan Sullivan, Nick Begich), forget it. Those two bozos are just happy to lay low and do whatever they're told. No fake anguish there. See also: Murkowski's Big Ugly Vote (AK Beacon).]

TikTok Clock

Here comes TrumpTok.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said there was a “framework for a deal” for a TikTok sale, though he has said the words “framework for a deal” eleventy-hundred times. Through the months of Trump’s insane pingponging deals with China we have learned that “framework” and “deal” are two very different things. Though at least this is better than the “handshake for a framework” Howard Lutnick said they had back in June. So on Friday are Trump and Scott Bessent really, finally going to get that deal from China on those rare earth minerals, the ones US tech companies need to make all of their AI chips, planes, and high-tech gadgets that Trump screwed them out of by self-embargoing the US? It’s concepts of a framework for maybe!

TikTok being forced under his thumb has apparently long been a wish of Trump’s, at least since app users first ground his gears back in 2020 by registering to attend his rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with no intention of showing up, causing his delicate ego embarrassment when the yuge surging crowd he was expecting turned out to be a mere trickle. He raged for TikTok to be BANNED, because something something Chinese spies, and Congress passed an act that banned the app unless its algorithm was put under the control of a US company. And Joe Biden signed it!

Remember that extra-stupid hearing with TikTok’s CEO Shou Chew, with Tom Cotton refusing to accept that he is from Singapore, which is a whole different country than China, and how embarrassingly pig-ignorant the senators were about the basics of how the Internet even works?

 

But, the Chinese government doesn’t and has never owned TikTok. A Chinese man founded it and is still 20 percent of the board, but the company was never incorporated in China. There has been no evidence that the Chinese government ever had access to user data, much less that they were using it to spy on dissidents or Americans making cucumber salads.

TikTok is owned by ByteDance Ltd., which is headquartered in the Cayman Islands, and TikTok Inc. is headquartered in Los Angeles and Singapore. And its servers — ORACLE servers, in fact — dish out its secret-sauce algorithm from Virginia. Sixty percent of ByteDance is currently owned by non-Chinese global institutional investors including Susquehanna International Group (majority shareholder Jeff Yass), the Carlyle Group, General Atlantic, KKR, BlackRock, and Tiger Global Management; 20 percent of the firm is owned by Beijing-based founder Zhang Yiming, and 20 percent is owned by employees.

But Congress and Biden decided to ban the app anyway, after Trump had said it was a CHINESE SPY EMERGENCY. And then some curious things happened!

Jeff Yass, the managing director of Susquehanna International Group, the company that is also the largest shareholder of TikTok’s parent company, bought two percent of Digital World Acquisition Corporation, which merged with Trump Media & Technology Group, making its share price surge 140 percent, defibrillating Trump’s flatlining company.

And then right before the ‘24 election, the TikTok algorithm underwent a noticeable shift, and Trumpy content began appearing in people’s feeds when it hadn’t before. And TikTok CEO Shou Chew attended Trump’s inauguration in January.

And after his win, Trump credited TikTok with helping him win more young voters, so he loved it again and decided to save it, even going to the Supreme Court to try to stop them from enacting the ban he himself had asked Congress to pass. The deadline for a sale has since been extended four times already, and has now been pushed off until December 16.

The Wall Street Journal has more details of the prospective deal: The company’s board would stay the same, except that Zhang Yiming’s stake would be reduced to less than 20 percent, and a consortium of US companies, including Susquehanna International, KKR, General Atlantic Oracle, Silver Lake, and Andreessen Horowitz would control 80 percent of the company. A new US entity would be created, with a board with one member designated by the US government, which is unheard of. And the US company would license the magic algorithm, putting it into a new US version of the app, so that the Trumpy board would be able to customize it and make it massage everybody’s feed this way and that, promoting the reach of some accounts and limiting access to others.

by Marcie Jones, Wonkette |  Read more:

Image: YouTube/Guardian

[ed. I try to pay attention but this whole TikTok deal is too convoluted and politicized to make any sense. Is this some kind of sweatheart business deal, budding propaganda platform, rare-earth minerals squeeze...or what? Who knows.]

The Way They Were

In 1986, my most prized possession was a little pink phone message slip written by a hotel clerk.

“Miss Dowd,” it read, “Robert Redford called. He’s at the same number as last night.”

I’d never met Redford, but that piece of paper was a magic portal to all kinds of pink-cloud fantasies. I stuck it up on my cubicle in the Washington bureau of The Times and gazed at it whenever I needed a lift.

Then, one night, the bureau chief went on a crazed cleaning campaign and sent a crew in to throw out every stray piece of paper around our desks.

I came in the next morning and my beloved message was gone.

I had called Redford to interview him for a Times Magazine profile on Paul Newman. Often, movie stars won’t talk about other movie stars (it’s not about them!); Joanne Woodward wouldn’t even talk to me about her husband for that piece.

But Redford was happy to talk about his pal. When I heard that famous voice on the phone, I said: “Wait a minute, let me get a pen and pencil. I mean, a pen and pen. No, a pen and paper.”

He just laughed, accustomed to women getting flustered.

I heard from someone on his team about seven years later. Redford wanted to offer me a role in a movie he was directing called “Quiz Show.” It was just one line — “Excuse me, are you the son?” — uttered by a woman who’s at a book party trying to chat up Ralph Fiennes’s Charles Van Doren, the fraudulent quiz whiz and son of the renowned Shakespearean scholar Mark Van Doren.

I wrote Redford a note, explaining that I was too shy to act in a glossy movie. I couldn’t even muster the nerve to do TV as myself.

He sent a handwritten letter back, telling me that being shy was not a good excuse and that he was shy and you had to push past that and take risks. It was a charming letter — and I vowed to take his advice in the future.

Years later, I got to know Redford over friendly lunches and dinners and interviews for The Times and at Harvard’s Kennedy School. And that rarest of things happened: He was everything you hoped he would be. I had the same experience when I spent that week interviewing Newman.

Both men were elusive, private, funny, generous and self-deprecating. They both liked painting and writing poetry. (Newman’s poetry — and humor — was goofier.) And they both struggled with the sex symbol role.

“To work as hard as I’ve worked to accomplish anything and then have some yo-yo come up and say, ‘Take off those dark glasses and let’s have a look at those blue eyes’ is really discouraging,” Newman told me, adding: “Usually, I just say, ‘I would take off my sunglasses, madam, but my pants would fall down.’” What if his eyes turned brown, he wondered ruefully, and he died a failure?

Redford chafed at the chatter about his blond locks. At first, he told me, it felt great when he became a top Hollywood hunk with “Butch Cassidy” and “The Way We Were.” But then the constant references to his looks and some “out of whack” fan run-ins made it “exhausting.” He felt like he was being put in a cage and wanted to protest, “No, I’m an actor.”

When I talked to him for his solitary and horrific sailboat yarn, “All Is Lost,” in 2013, about aging onscreen and whether it became harder to do close-ups, he replied: “Well, let’s get something straight. I don’t see myself as beautiful. I was a kid who was freckle-faced, and they used to call me ‘hay head.’”

When Redford got kicked out of college in Colorado and lost his baseball scholarship for carousing too much, he went to be an underfed bohemian in Europe, trying his hand at painting. He wore a beret and stripy T-shirt but failed to impress French girls, who thought he was too ignorant about politics.

While being gorgeous can propel your career — can we agree that Newman and Redford were the most charismatic screen couple ever? — there is also a penalty. It’s as though you can’t have too much. Many in Hollywood were slow to realize what wonderful actors the two men were. Despite a string of indelible performances, Newman did not win a best actor Oscar until 1987, for “The Color of Money.” And Redford, an iconic American star of the sort that no longer exists, never won an Oscar for acting.

They both kept Hollywood at arm’s length, disdaining the superficiality, which didn’t endear them to Tinseltown. Newman lived on the East Coast and Redford conjured Sundance, creating a film lab and festival that transformed the movie industry and produced many great talents. (He was appalled when it got so popular that Paris Hilton showed up.)

The two friends with the raffish all-American smiles and sporting lives radiated cool and glamour, as though — to paraphrase “The Way We Were” — things came too easily to them.

But their self-images were different. Newman, the son of a Cleveland sporting goods store owner, said he thought of himself as a terrier with a bone, always working to make his acting more distilled. Redford, who grew up feeling economically insecure and suffered a bout of polio when he was 11, told me he thought of himself as climbing the hill, Sisyphus-style, never “standing at the top.” He quoted a favorite T.S. Eliot line: “There is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”

Both men could be uncomfortable in their skins, filled with self-doubt, haunted by family traumas. Newman lost a son and Redford lost two.

And yet, over several decades, they helped define American culture with their riveting portrayals of morally ambiguous characters.

“I was not interested in the red, white and blue part of America,” Redford told NPR’s Terry Gross. “I was interested in the gray part where complexity lies.”

by Maureen Dowd, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Robert Redford and Paul Newman in 1969’s “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”Credit...Screen Archives/Getty Images

No Public Comment Allowed

No public comment or hearings on environmental review of oil leasing in Alaska’s Cook Inlet. The U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is cutting out a public comment process, citing a Trump administration policy aimed at ‘streamlining’ development.

Federal regulators will accept no public comments on a pending environmental study of oil leasing in Alaska’s Cook Inlet, a U.S. Department of the Interior agency announced through a Federal Register notice published Thursday.

There will be no public comment period and no public hearing on a draft supplemental environmental impact statement for a Cook Inlet lease sale that was held in 2022 but found to be legally flawed, said U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which manages oil and gas development in federal offshore areas.

The rejection of public comments is in accordance with Trump administration changes to the National Environmental Policy Act, the 55-year-old law that guides federal decisions about activities that may have environmental impacts. The changes are aimed at speeding up environmental reviews and developing infrastructure projects.

BOEM is following the administration’s updated NEPA regulations and a new department handbook on the law, which went into effect on July 3, said Elizabeth Pearce, a U.S. Department of the Interior senior public affairs specialist.

“This Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement is narrowly focused on addressing the court’s concerns, without a separate public-comment round – streamlining what is typically a protracted, multi-year process down to a few months.” Pearce said by email on Thursday.

Although no public comments will be accepted, the public will be able to read the new environmental impact statement when it is finished, Pearce added. “The completed Supplemental EIS will be posted online so Alaskans and other stakeholders can see exactly how we addressed the court’s limited concerns,” she said. [ed. How nice. God forbid the government would want us to know what it's doing.]

The Cook Inlet environmental study stems from a federal lease sale that was held on Dec. 30, 2022. It drew only one bid. (...)

BOEM’s announcement about the lack of public comment opportunities was blasted by environmental plaintiffs in the case.

“BOEM’s decision to exclude the public from its supplemental environmental statement is unacceptable. Public participation is not a box to check — it is the heart of NEPA,” Loren Barrett, co-executive director the water conservation non-profit Cook Inletkeeper, said in an emailed statement. (...)

“This secrecy around exploiting public waters for fossil fuels is completely unacceptable. It would only take one oil spill to devastate Cook Inlet and its beluga whales, which is why the law requires transparency for these dangerous sales,” Monsell said in a statement. 

by Yereth Rosen, Alaska Beacon |  Read more:

Image: Yereth Rosen

[ed. This is what I did (among other things) during my career. Never in my 30+ years overseeing oil and gas leasing in Alaska was the public ever excluded from commenting on lease sales or any other major federal action. Presumably this recent edict applies to the State of Alaska, as well. It isn't legal, but it's not surprising either. What happened to state's rights?]

The Uggo Police

The life of Marilyn Monroe yields a few lessons for those who would follow in her footsteps. One, don’t marry a playwright. Two, get paid. No current-day actress has taken this second lesson to heart like Sydney Sweeney, whose tousled good looks are practically designed to make people underestimate her. Sweeney understands that being an object of sexual fantasy involves a hefty dose of contempt—and says, If that’s the game, I’m going to make some money off of me, too. She’s under no illusions that if her career is left to others, she’ll be cast in parts she finds interesting. So if she sees a script she likes, she funds it herself. To get money, she sells stuff: bath soap that supposedly contains her bathwater, jeans, ice cream.

And if these products are advertised in ways that are a little tasteless, or a little offensive, that means that people will talk about the ads, and that talk means sales, and those sales mean, in the end, more checks for Sweeney. Asking whether or not Sweeney knew that a jeans ad campaign with the tagline “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans” would activate the very weird and very horny portion of the Internet that has made her into a symbol of anti-wokeness misses the point. She would have done it either way. That is, I imagine that Sweeney regards her crew of weird, horny right-wing fans the same way she probably regards any group of fans: as wallets.

As for me, personally? I like Sydney Sweeney, in a vague way that doesn’t mean I have any interest in her movies. I just have a lot of respect for actors who don’t ever say no to a check (see, Orson Welles). The other side of libidinal contempt is feel-good pity, but there’s nothing pitiable about Sweeney either. Some girls are born connected, some girls are born pretty, and some girls are born smart. Two out of three isn’t so bad. But her cultists are another story. Aside from the obvious—adopting Sydney Sweeney as a cause allows them to post pictures of her in underwear with plausible deniability—what’s going on there?

The “Ballad of Sydney Sweeney” goes like this: “They” wanted to exterminate beautiful busty blondes. “They” put ugly people in ads (sometimes). Now, however, here comes Sydney Sweeney, ending wokeness once and for all. The implication is that at some point in the past ten years, it’s been disadvantageous to be a curvaceous babe. The only sense in which that is true has not changed: Sweeney keeps showing up in ads in bras that don’t fit. But never mind that; thanks to Sweeney, it is now legal to be hot. The hot people have come out from the places where they’d been driven into hiding by the uggo police. Now they frolic freely in the sun. Very touching.

Meanwhile, the anti-Sweeney in this drama is Taylor Swift. Swift and Sweeney have been pitted against each other by spectators, including Donald Trump: Swift, who represents woke, is no longer hot; Sweeney, anti-woke, is hot. (Out with the old blonde, in with the new.) Like so many statements about both Taylor Swift and Sydney Sweeney, or, for that matter, by Trump, this one has no tether to reality, but it’s how a certain type of person wants things to be. There’s a level of personal betrayal at play here. Swift, who stays out of trouble, avoids politics, doesn’t do drugs, rarely seems out of control, and sings about love, was the crypto-conservative icon of an earlier era. Eventually, it turned out that she was not one of them. Their Brünnhilde was within another ring of fire. Now all their hopes are pinned on Sweeney.

Does something about this scenario feel a little off to you? Not to sound like I’ve woken up from a coma, in which I have languished since 1992 after hearing Dan Quayle rail against Murphy Brown, but when exactly did making cleavage great again become a conservative cause? Somebody with the combined memory powers of (let’s say) three goldfish can easily imagine an alternate present in which Sweeney and her cleavage were an object of outraged conservative disdain. In this other world, Sweeney is attracting rage-filled press over her horror movie in which (I’m told) she plays a nun who bashes a baby to death. But in this world, these people don’t even get to do that. All rage provides is free marketing.

The people who are slavering over Sweeney will cheerfully confess to motivations that are gross enough. They like her because she’s white, busty, blonde, thin, and blue-eyed, but it seems like the white part might be the most important trait [ed. don't think so.]. To them, Sweeney represents things being right with the world; she’s the hot cheerleader to their collective star quarterback. (Among her many crimes, Taylor Swift’s engagement to a woke-for-football fellow, whose name I can’t recall, surely ranks pretty high on the list.) She’s the human embodiment of A.I.-generated pictures of beautiful white families, on a farm, reading the Bible, captioned, This is what they took from you!

Intriguingly little of this fandom has anything to do with Sydney Sweeney, the actual person, her professional life, or her public statements. When Doreen St. Félix, a writer for the New Yorker, had the temerity to call the American Eagle ad (and Sweeney, by implication) “banal,” the immediate reaction was to try to get her fired by digging up tweets she had written more than ten years ago and accusing her of racism against white people. One wonders whether what really set them off was St. Félix’s pointing out that Sweeney dyes her hair blonde: “Her blondness, like a lot of adult blondness, is a chemical thing masquerading as natural only to those most gullible in the population, straight men, who don’t know, and don’t care to understand, how much of so-called natural female beauty is constructed.” As both St. Félix’s piece and the subsequent backlash illustrated, the idea that Sydney Sweeney might be marketing herself undoes the illusion of the naturally beautiful girl who attracts attention and fame for doing nothing. Her fans miss all the things Sweeney herself clearly is—a smart businesswoman and an ambitious artist—because in her advertisements they see only a sleepy-looking fantasy object. Do any of these people even know that Sweeney makes movies? It’s an open question. (...)

So these people are deprived not only of the chance to ogle but of control. Neither their approval nor their disapproval can move the needle. The only thing that can is conjuring up the idea of a phantom lib, outraged and disapproving, and hoping some real people will come along to play the part. This type of resentment politics is the only card they really have: Look at how they despise you; make them mad, drink their tears! There’s always a professor somewhere who has said something inflammatory and stupid to back up this assertion.

But who cares? Really. Who cares? At last, to own the libs, we can admit McDonald’s tastes good, have fun at the movies, and post pictures of beautiful women in advertisements. But we already could do all of those things. It’s just that McDonald’s is junk, the movies are junk, and those advertisements exist to sell us junk. (...)

It might sound paradoxical to say that Sweeney’s worst fans adore her because they hate women, but it’s true. (Also, they don’t adore her.) There is always a young blonde to attach yourself to, and an older blonde to throw away. As long as Sweeney does nothing to alienate them, they will continue to hype her up; if one day she endorses a politician they don’t like, then it will be time to start talking about how she’s washed (or whatever slang has replaced “washed” by then). What they really want, besides the Fourth Reich, is a world in which women are either objects or invisible, disposable or essentially private.

by B.D. McClay, The Lamp |  Read more:

Image: American Eagle

[ed. Still high on winning the 'War on Christmas'. Also, have nothing against breasts.]

Uh Oh, US Farmers Totally Screwed

And that is bad news for The Groceries.

For fucking around with the world of Trump, some groups of people are reaching the find out phase faster and harder than others. And one of those groups is among the most loyal to the regime, farmers. While farm income is technically up, it’s only because of $42 billion in socialist bailout money in the form of a 720 percent increase in ad hoc disaster payments, that so far have made up more than 23 percent of Net Farm Income in 2025. But without that, farm income is down nearly 6 percent from December. And economists with the University of Illinois report that agricultural exports dropped by nearly $5 billion in just July alone.

The reason why is no mystery! Those Trump tariffs screwed over farmers coming and going, with higher input costs for supplies like seeds, fertilizer, and tractors, and lower selling prices for commodities. So far this year, China has not purchased one single, solitary soybean, opting to shop for them in friendlier Brazil, instead.

And US soybean farmers are projected to lose roughly $100 an acre this year. Nor are Mexican or Canadian companies as interested in buying the US’s corn or rice, now that retaliatory tariffs have made them more expensive. So farmers who took out loans or dipped into capital reserves expecting to sell their crops are facing the threat of bankruptcy, and in Q1 of 2025 the number of farm bankruptcies was nearly double the level of the first quarter of 2024.

Of course Trump knew full well this was going to happen, because it happened in his first term too: He levied tariffs, farm bankruptcies reached the highest level in a decade, and he ended up giving farmers a $16 billion bailout. And now Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins says even more bailout money might be coming.

It would be simple to help out farmers without giving them any socialist bailout money. Quit tariffing fertilizer, for one thing! Even Chuck Grassley has noticed this.

There’s a guy who definitely writes his own posts, who surely does watch a lot of corn. In an interview with RFD-TV, he vented more:

“We’ve got this farm crisis now, and this President should deal with this farm crisis right now. I’m hearing from bankers. I’m hearing from people that are getting pressed by their bankers to maybe sell part of their farm to somebody, [so] that when they build up their equity, they might be able to buy it back. We haven’t had this kind of stress in agriculture since the 1980s.”

Another big-brain idea, quit tariffing tractors! Or even just make ONE tariff rate and stick to it. The tariffs aren’t only expensive, they’re bizarrely complicated, and of course, prone to shifting with the tides of Dear Leader’s ever-changing moods.
From the WSJ:

The effective tariff facing exporters now varies depending on a product’s metal content. For a machine worth $1 million with a 20% steel content, the rate would be 50% of $200,000 and 15% of the rest, resulting in a $220,000 levy per machine—or a 22% tariff. The U.S. has said it would review the metals tariff list every four months, adding to the uncertainty.

Or as Grassley put it:

“Putting 50% tariffs on things that have steel in them, when you can’t buy those things in the United States, and you need them for your tractor to be finally manufactured? There should be tariffs on things that you can’t get in the United States. Why drive up the price of John Deeres because of a tariff on something they need for the tractor that they can’t even get in the United States? It’s a stupid policy.”

Indeed, if the point of these tariffs is to start making more tractors in the US, why put kooky tariffs on the metal that tractors are made out of? If we were cynical, it might seem like a ploy to make farmland real cheap so big agribusiness can buy it all up.

And the shortage of farmworkers is another self-made Trump problem. When the regime isn’t humiliatingly rounding up and detaining people with and without proper work visas, it’s also allowing the ones who do have H-2A visas to work in conditions one federal judge called “a form of modern-day slavery,” where they’re frequently abused, get their wages stolen, and are threatened with a call to ICE if they complain. (...)

And then there’s how USAID is no more, and not buying farmers’ extra grain any more. Cruel as they are stupid, ayup.

Are Republicans starting to smell the disaster Trump is brewing? Polling shows more Republicans than Democrats are worried about the economy, and Trump’s approval rating on the top issue dumbshit voters picked him to fix, The Groceries, has been going down to poundtown. And his approval rating is underwater in most states, including the breadbasket ones. Even in Arkansas, it’s plunged to single digits.

Anyway, it’s tempting to laugh at the poor dumb rural folk who thought that Donald Trump, the man who went broke on casinos, was going to be their savior. He bailed them out before, so guess they just expect that he and Congress will keep on doing it.

But we all have to eat, and bad news for The Groceries is bad news for everybody. But good news, soyboys, maybe at least domestic soybeans will be real cheap.

by Marci Jones, Wonkette |  Read more:

Image: Tomasz Filipek on Unsplash
[ed. For a clear explanation of why so many farmers supported Trump (knowing full well the downsides). See this:

How I Joined the Resistance

The religious evolution of J.D. Vance.

I prided myself on an ability to overwhelm the opposition with my logic. There was an arrogance at the heart of my worldview, emotionally and intellectually. But I comforted myself with an appeal to a philosopher whose atheism-cum-libertarianism told me everything I wanted to hear: Ayn Rand. Great, smart men were only arrogant if they were wrong, and I was anything but that. (...)

To lose my faith was to lose my cultural conservatism, and in a world that was growing increasingly aligned with the Republican party, my ideological response took the form of overcompensation: having lost my cultural conservatism, I would become even more economically conservative. The irony, of course, is that it was the economic program of the Republican party that least interested my family—none of them cared how much the Bush administration slashed tax rates for billionaires. The G.O.P. became a kind of totem—I attached myself to it ever more strongly because it gave me some common ground with my family. And the most respectable way to do so among my new college friends was through a dogged commitment to neoliberal economic orthodoxy. Tax breaks and Social Security cuts were socially acceptable ways to be conservative among the American elite. (...)

As I advanced through our educational hierarchy—moving on from Ohio State to Yale Law School—I began to worry that my assimilation into elite culture came at a high cost. My sister once told me that the song that made her think of me was “Simple Man” by Lynyrd Skynyrd. Though I had fallen in love, I found that the emotional demons of my childhood made it hard to be the type of partner I’d always wanted to be. My Randian arrogance about my own ability melted away when confronted with the realization that an obsession with achievement would fail to produce the achievement that mattered most to me for so much of my life: a happy, thriving family.

I had immersed myself in the logic of the meritocracy and found it deeply unsatisfying. And I began to wonder: were all these worldly markers of success actually making me a better person? I had traded virtue for achievement and found the latter wanting. But the woman I wanted to marry cared little whether I obtained a Supreme Court clerkship. She just wanted me to be a good person.

It’s possible, of course, to overstate our own inadequacies. I never cheated on my would-be spouse. I never became violent with her. But there was a voice in my head that demanded better of me: that I put her interests above my own; that I master my temper for her sake as much as for mine. And I began to realize that this voice, wherever it came from, was not the same one that compelled me to climb as high as I could up our ladder of meritocracy. It came from somewhere more ancient, and more grounded—it required reflection about where I came from rather than cultural divorce from it.

As I considered these twin desires—for success and character—and how they conflicted (and didn’t), I came across a meditation from Saint Augustine on Genesis. I had been a fan of Augustine since a political theorist in college assigned City of God. But his thoughts on Genesis spoke to me, and are worth reproducing at length:

In matters that are obscure and far beyond our vision, even in such as we may find treated in Holy Scripture, different Interpretations are sometimes possible without prejudice to the faith we have received. In such a case, we should not rush in headlong and so firmly take our stand on one side that, if further progress in the search of truth justly undermines this position, we too fall with it. That would be to battle not for the teaching of Holy Scripture but for our own, wishing its teaching to conform to ours, whereas we ought to wish ours to conform to that of Sacred Scripture.

Let us suppose that in explaining the words, “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and light was made,” (Gn 1, 3), one man thinks that it was material light that was made, and another that it was spiritual. As to the actual existence of “spiritual light” in a spiritual creature, our faith leaves no doubt; as to the existence of material light, celestial or supercelestial, even existing before the heavens, a light which could have been followed by night, there will be nothing in such a supposition contrary to the faith until un-erring truth gives the lie to it. And if that should happen, this teaching was never in Holy Scripture but was an opinion proposed by man in his ignorance.

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of the world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?

I couldn’t stop thinking about how I would have reacted to this passage when I was a kid: If someone had made the very same argument to me when I was 17, I would have called him a heretic. This was an accommodation to science, the kind that someone like Bill Maher rightly mocked contemporary moderate Christians for indulging. Yet here was a person telling us 1600 years ago that my own approach to Genesis was arrogance—the kind that might turn a person from his faith.

This, it turned out, was a little too on the nose, and the first crack in my proverbial armor. I began circulating the quote among friends—believers and nonbelievers alike, and I thought about it constantly.

Around the same time, I attended a talk at our law school with Peter Thiel. This was 2011, and Thiel was a well-known venture capitalist but hardly a household name. He would later blurb my book and become a good friend, but I had no idea what to expect at the time. He spoke first in personal terms: arguing that we were increasingly tracked into cutthroat professional competitions. We would compete for appellate clerkships, and then Supreme Court clerkships. We would compete for jobs at elite law firms, and then for partnerships at those same places. At each juncture, he said, our jobs would offer longer work hours, social alienation from our peers, and work whose prestige would fail to make up for its meaninglessness. He also argued that his own world of Silicon Valley spent too little time on the technological breakthroughs that made life better—those in biology, energy, and transportation—and too much on things like software and mobile phones. Everyone could now tweet at each other, or post photos on Facebook, but it took longer to travel to Europe, we had no cure for cognitive decline and dementia, and our energy use increasingly dirtied the planet. He saw these two trends—elite professionals trapped in hyper-competitive jobs, and the technological stagnation of society—as connected. If technological innovation were actually driving real prosperity, our elites wouldn’t feel increasingly competitive with one another over a dwindling number of prestigious outcomes.

Peter’s talk remains the most significant moment of my time at Yale Law School. He articulated a feeling that had until then remained unformed: that I was obsessed with achievement in se—not as an end to something meaningful, but to win a social competition. My worry that I had prioritized striving over character took on a heightened significance: striving for what? I didn’t even know why I cared about the things I cared about. I fancied myself educated, enlightened, and especially wise about the ways of the world—at least compared with most of the people from my hometown. Yet I was obsessed with obtaining professional credentials—a clerkship with a federal judge and then an associate position at a prestigious firm—that I didn’t understand. I hated my limited exposure to legal practice. I looked to the future, and realized that I’d been running a desperate race where the first prize was a job I hated.

I began immediately planning for a career outside the law, which is why I spent less than two years after graduation as a practicing attorney. But Peter left me with one more thing: he was possibly the smartest person I’d ever met, but he was also a Christian. He defied the social template I had constructed—that dumb people were Christians and smart ones atheists. I began to wonder where his religious belief came from, which led me to René Girard, the French philosopher whom he apparently studied under at Stanford. Girard’s thought is rich enough that any effort to summarize will fail to do the man justice. His theory of mimetic rivalry—that we tend to compete over the things that other people want—spoke directly to some of the pressures I experienced at Yale. But it was his related theory of the scapegoat—and what it revealed about Christianity—that made me reconsider my faith.

One of Girard’s central insights is that human civilizations are often, perhaps even always, founded on a “scapegoat myth”—an act of violence committed against someone who has wronged the broader community, retold as a sort of origin story for the community.
 (...)

To Girard, the Christian story contains a crucial difference—a difference that reveals something “hidden since the foundation of the world.” In the Christian telling, the ultimate scapegoat has not wronged the civilization; the civilization has wronged him. The victim of the madness of crowds is, as Christ was, infinitely powerful—able to prevent his own murder—and perfectly innocent—undeserving of the rage and violence of the crowd. In Christ, we see our efforts to shift blame and our own inadequacies onto a victim for what they are: a moral failing, projected violently upon someone else. Christ is the scapegoat who reveals our imperfections, and forces us to look at our own flaws rather than blame our society’s chosen victims.

People come to truth in different ways, and I’m sure some will find this account unsatisfying. But in 2013, it captured so well the psychology of my generation, especially its most privileged inhabitants. Mired in the swamp of social media, we identified a scapegoat and digitally pounced. We were keyboard warriors, unloading on people via Facebook and Twitter, blind to our own problems. We fought over jobs we didn’t actually want while pretending we didn’t fight for them at all. And the end result for me, at least, was that I had lost the language of virtue. I felt more shame over failing in a law school exam than I did about losing my temper with my girlfriend.

That all had to change. It was time to stop scapegoating and focus on what I could do to improve things. (...)

I noticed during my research that many of those social problems came from behavior for which social scientists and policy experts had a different vocabulary. On the right, the conversation often turned to “culture” and “personal responsibility”—the ways in which individuals or communities held back their own progress. And though it seemed obvious to me that there was something dysfunctional about some of the places in which I’d grown up, the discourse on the right seemed a little heartless. It failed to account for the fact that destructive behaviors were almost always tragedies with terrible consequences. It is one thing to wag your finger at another person for failing to act a certain way, but it is something else to feel the weight of the misery that comes from those actions.

The left’s intellectuals focused much more on the structural and external problems facing families like mine—the difficulty in finding jobs and the lack of funding for certain types of resources. And while I agreed that more resources were often necessary, there seemed to me a sense in which our most destructive behaviors persisted—even flourished—in times of material comfort. The economic left was often more compassionate, but theirs was a kind of compassion—devoid of any expectation—that reeked of giving up. A compassion that assumes a person is disadvantaged to the point of hopelessness is like sympathy for a zoo animal, and I had no use for it.

And as I reflected on these competing views of the world, and the wisdom and shortcomings of each, I felt desperate for a worldview that understood our bad behavior as simultaneously social and individual, structural and moral; that recognized that we are products of our environment; that we have a responsibility to change that environment, but that we are still moral beings with individual duties; one that could speak against rising rates of divorce and addiction, not as sanitized conclusions about their negative social externalities, but with moral outrage. (...)

And here, again, the words of Saint Augustine echoed from a millennium and a half earlier, articulating a truth I had felt for a long time but hadn’t spoken. This is a passage from City of God, where Augustine summarizes the debauchery of Rome’s ruling class:

This is our concern, that every man be able to increase his wealth so as to supply his daily prodigalities, and so that the powerful may subject the weak for their own purposes. Let the poor court the rich for a living, and that under their protection they may enjoy a sluggish tranquillity; and let the rich abuse the poor as their dependants, to minister to their pride. Let the people applaud not those who protect their interests, but those who provide them with pleasure. Let no severe duty be commanded, no impurity forbidden. Let kings estimate their prosperity, not by the righteousness, but by the servility of their subjects. Let the provinces stand loyal to the kings, not as moral guides, but as lords of their possessions and purveyors of their pleasures; not with a hearty reverence, but a crooked and servile fear. Let the laws take cognizance rather of the injury done to another man’s property, than of that done to one’s own person. If a man be a nuisance to his neighbor, or injure his property, family, or person, let him be actionable; but in his own affairs let everyone with impunity do what he will in company with his own family, and with those who willingly join him. Let there be a plentiful supply of public prostitutes for every one who wishes to use them, but specially for those who are too poor to keep one for their private use. Let there be erected houses of the largest and most ornate description: in these let there be provided the most sumptuous banquets, where every one who pleases may, by day or night, play, drink, vomit, dissipate. Let there be everywhere heard the rustling of dancers, the loud, immodest laughter of the theatre; let a succession of the most cruel and the most voluptuous pleasures maintain a perpetual excitement. If such happiness is distasteful to any, let him be branded as a public enemy; and if any attempt to modify or put an end to it let him be silenced, banished, put an end to. Let these be reckoned the true gods, who procure for the people this condition of things, and preserve it when once possessed.

It was the best criticism of our modern age I’d ever read. A society oriented entirely towards consumption and pleasure, spurning duty and virtue. Not long after I first read these words, my friend Oren Cass published a book arguing that American policy makers have focused far too much on promoting consumption as opposed to productivity, or some other measure of wellbeing. The reaction—criticizing Oren for daring to push policies that might lower consumption—almost proved the argument. “Yes,” I found myself saying, “Oren’s preferred policies might reduce per-capita consumption. But that’s precisely the point: our society is more than the sum of its economic statistics. If people die sooner in the midst of historic levels of consumption, then perhaps our focus on consumption is misguided.”

And indeed it was this insight, more than any other, that ultimately led not just to Christianity, but to Catholicism. Despite my Mamaw’s unfamiliarity with the liturgy, the Roman and Italian cultural influences, and the foreign pope, I slowly began to see Catholicism as the closest expression of her kind of Christanity: obsessed with virtue, but cognizant of the fact that virtue is formed in the context of a broader community; sympathetic with the meek and poor of the world without treating them primarily as victims; protective of children and families and with the things necessary to ensure they thrive. And above all: a faith centered around a Christ who demands perfection of us even as He loves unconditionally and forgives easily.

by J.D. Vance, The Lamp |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Poor J.D. definitely lost the plot (not hard if solipsism and rationalization are your super powers). Hard to feel sorry for him though. In his present world view - Catholic or not - ambition (maybe destiny!) Trumps everything.]

Decades of Public-Lands Planning, Overturned in a Day

On the sagebrush plains of eastern Montana, cattle graze alongside mule deer, and pumpjacks rise from coal seams. For nearly a decade, the future of this landscape was hammered out in the Miles City Resource Management Plan, a compromise shaped by ranchers, tribes, hunters, energy companies and conservationists. Now, with one vote in Washington, Congress has thrown that bargain into doubt, and with it, decades of public-lands decisions across the West.

Finalized in November 2024 after years of debate and litigation, the Miles City plan is one of the nation’s largest, governing 12 million acres of BLM land and 55 million acres of federal mineral estate across eastern Montana.

But on Sept. 3, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to overturn three Bureau of Land Management plans, including Miles City, under the Congressional Review Act, the first time the law has ever been applied to land-use planning. Legal experts and conservation groups warn that the consequences could be far-reaching, enabling Congress to unravel decades of environmental protections and management decisions on public lands.

Resource management plans serve as guidelines for how the BLM manages the public lands it oversees. The plans are developed through a lengthy process that combines local and tribal input with environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act. The goal is to create a blueprint for “multiple use” management, balancing economic activities such as grazing and oil and gas development with other concerns, including wildlife habitat, outdoor recreation and conservation.

In Montana, the disappearance of that blueprint will have immediate consequences. Ranchers face uncertainty on how many cattle they can run, when their permits will be renewed, and what will happen during a serious drought. Tribal cultural sites are likely to be left unprotected and years of tribal consultation overridden. Conservation groups warn that congressional vetoes could sideline science-based safeguards for vulnerable habitats. In Miles City, the resource management plan would have reformed coal seam leases near the Powder River Basin; without those reforms, habitat for elk, mule deer, sharp-tailed grouse and pheasants could be fragmented by new energy development.

The Miles City plan drew input from ranchers, tribes, energy companies, hunters, outdoor recreation groups and conservation groups, and its supporters argue that undoing it sets a dangerous precedent.

“It’s disregarding all the conversations that have happened on the ground,” said Land Tawney of American Hunters and Anglers. “That balance sometimes isn’t perfect for anybody, but it’s a path forward for all.” (...)

The 1996 Congressional Review Act allows Congress to overturn agency rules within a 60-day window using only a simple majority, bypassing the filibuster. This is the first time resource management plans have ever been treated as “rules.”

“That’s why we’re at an inflection point,” said Chris Winter, director of the Getches-Wilkinson Center at the University of Colorado Law School. (Disclosure: Winter serves on High Country News’ board of directors.) Resource management plans, he said, have never been submitted to Congress for review. “Applying it now could unravel decades of land-use planning practice,” he said.

The CRA was employed only once before 2017, but the first Trump administration dramatically expanded its use. If this resolution stands, it would subject all RMPs to possible congressional approval, throwing every element of the planning process into doubt. According to Michael Blumm, a professor at Lewis & Clark Law School, this reinterpretation “calls into question the legitimacy” of the more than 100 plans finalized since the Congressional Review Act became law.

by Zoë Rom, High Country News | Read more:
Image: Luna Anna Archey

[ed. See also: Trump looks to suffocate public lands; and, How to comment on the planned roadless rule rollback (HCN).]

DSA Political Platform

Preamble

The Democratic Socialists of America are fighting to win a world organized and governed by and for the vast majority, the working class. We are socialist because we share a vision of a humane social order based on popular control of resources and production, economic planning, equitable distribution, feminism, racial equality and non-oppressive relationships. We are democratic because we know that this transformation cannot be won from the top down, by a small group of elites who claim to have all the answers, or by even well-meaning politicians. This transformation can only come from the bottom up, when millions of working-class people stand together. DSA organizes to realize our working-class collective power, which stems from the reliance of the capitalist economy on our labor. Democracy is necessary to win a socialist society. Socialism is the complete realization of democracy.

Our fight to end capitalist exploitation is inextricably tied to our fight to end oppression. A democratic socialist society must end all systemic domination, whether it’s based on race, religion, ethnic origin, sexual orientation, disability, or gender. The historical development of U.S. capitalism was heavily reliant on the theft of people’s lives and land, through the enslavement of Black people and genocide of Indigenous people. Our legal, economic, and social institutions continue to perpetuate racialized oppression. We will never be able to unify a multi-racial working class without confronting structural racism.

Likewise, a democratic socialist society must end the economic subjugation of women in the workplace, violence and harassement affecting women and non-binary people, and the entire system of unpaid, gendered work. We strive for the emancipation of all people by forging the multiracial working class into an organized, fighting force on the terms of its most oppressed members. In overcoming the old, barbaric order of capitalism, the working class will not only liberate itself from its own shackles, but all of humanity from the parasitic death-drive of capitalism. As capitalism’s climate crisis ravages the whole Earth, the well-being of the working class is ultimately aligned with the survival of the whole planet.

In 2021, the U.S. socialist movement is on the rise for the first time in most of our members’ lifetimes. Millions of people have been inspired to seek out alternatives to the existing political regime, owing to Bernie Sanders’ two democratic socialist presidential campaigns,

working-class electoral victories at all levels of government, massive popular protests and organizing for racial justice, an influential upsurge in militant labor activity, and strategic campaigns to build popular support for key issues, such as healthcare and climate change. In the four years of the Trump administration, DSA membership exploded and is currently approaching our goal of 100,000 members.

But this growth of the socialist movement is not nearly enough to overcome the devastating impact of four decades of neoliberal capitalism, let alone bring about a transition to socialism. Neoliberalism is the political project of lowering taxes for the rich and corporations, eviscerating democratic decision-making both in the workplace and at the ballot box, slashing spending on essential social services such as education and social security, deregulating industries across the economy, and opening up flows of capital across national borders. The success of neoliberalism has enforced a culture of hyper-individualism and alienation from the kinds of collective, democratic organizations necessary to challenge the power of the capitalist class.

This challenge highlights the insufficiency of “progressivism” as well as the critical task of DSA. Transformational change in society does not come from moral righteousness or a checklist of policy positions, but from growing and wielding power. It is therefore imperative that we organize the largest possible number of people to join DSA and work together with broader coalitions united around common goals. It is to these ends that we are setting out the platform that follows. We have a world to win.

by Democratic Socialists of America |  Read more:

[ed. Some good ideas here, but some really nuts ones too (though not as bad as Project 2025). This is from 2021, so given all that's happened since hopefully they've revised or discarded a bunch of the really crazy stuff (defunding police to zero?) and are focused more on restoring important programs and backing common sense solutions that won't alienate half the country (and that are practically achievable).]

Calvinball

In the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, there's a game called Calvinball. The only rule is that the person with the ball makes up new rules as they go. Whatever helps them win becomes the rule. That's American politics now. Democrats follow the rules. Republicans change them whenever they want. And Democrats keep losing because they're playing a game that no longer exists.

Let's start with the Supreme Court. When Justice Scalia died on February 13, 2016, President Obama picked Merrick Garland on March 16. That was 237 days before the election. Mitch McConnell said no. His reason was "The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice" (Hulse, 2020). He claimed there was a rule: no Supreme Court picks in an election year. Republicans refused to even hold a hearing. For 293 days.

Four years later, Justice Ginsburg died on September 18, 2020. That was 46 days before the election. McConnell rushed through Amy Coney Barrett in eight days before the election (Fandos, 2020). Suddenly the "rule" vanished. Remember Lindsey Graham. In 2016, he literally said "use my words against me" if Republicans ever did this. Then he voted for Barrett anyway (Montanaro, 2020).

Wisconsin, 2018. Democrats won every statewide race. Before the new governor took office, Republicans called a lame duck session. In 22 hours, they stripped the incoming Democratic governor of his powers (Stern, 2019). The Assembly Speaker admitted it plainly: "We are going to have a very liberal governor who is going to enact policies that are in direct contrast to what many of us believe in" (Stern, 2019). Translation: Democrats won, so we're changing the rules.

Money tells the same story. During Obama's presidency, McConnell called the deficit "the transcendent issue of our era" (Bolton, 2013). Obama inherited a $1.4 trillion deficit. He cut it to $665 billion (Treasury Department, 2013). Then Republicans took over in 2017. First thing they did was pass a tax cut that added $1.9 trillion to the debt (Tax Policy Center, 2024). Trump added $7.8 trillion to the debt in just four years (CRFB, 2024). When Biden was president the deficits mattered again.

Impeachment standards shift the same way. Republicans impeached Clinton for lying about sex. Lindsey Graham said using your office "in a way that hurts people" was enough to remove a president (Evon, 2019). Then Trump pressured Ukraine to investigate Biden. He incited January 6th. Graham called both impeachments a "sad, ridiculous sham" (Williams, 2019). Lying about sex was impeachable. Trying to overthrow an election was presidential privilege.

Mail voting might be the most brazen flip. Florida Republicans invented modern mail voting. In 1988, Connie Mack won a Senate race because absentee ballots went 3-to-1 for him (Gardner & Dawsey, 2021). For thirty years, Republicans made mail voting easier. Then Trump lost. Suddenly: "Republicans: BAN MAIL-IN VOTING!!!" (Rodriguez, 2025). Since 2020, 21 states have passed 33 laws making it harder to vote by mail (Brennan Center for Justice, 2024).

Texas showed us how creative they can get. Their 2021 abortion law lets any random person sue anyone who helps with an abortion for $10,000 plus legal fees (Texas Legislature, 2021). This structure meant courts couldn't block the law since there's no officials to stop it. Even when judges said it was unconstitutional, clinics stayed closed. The law says if you provide abortions while fighting in court and lose later, you owe money for every procedure (Whole Woman's Health v. Jackson, 2021). Oklahoma and Idaho copied this trick.

Republicans have a significant advantage: it's easier to destroy existing structures than build new ones.

by Christopher Armitage, The Existential Republic | Read more:
Image: Drew Angerer/Getty Images/Politico
[ed. Sorry for another political post. Everything's going to hell so fast, sometimes it's hard to connect the dots (especially when you don't pay much attention or get most of your news from tv - especially Fox). When history gets written and we finally know how this all goes down I hope those complicit are forever remembered and shamed for their role in destroying this country's potential (and looting its riches). But if history is any guide, they won't be.]

Fascism is a cancer of the body politic. The ideas that form its foundation as a philosophy are there in every society, and each culture manages them the way most bodies contain pre-cancerous cells that will never metastasize because the body is healthy enough to maintain itself despite its underlying flaws. The far more interesting question than “who”, for me, is “what”? What are the conditions and triggers that cause the cancer of fascism to overwhelm the counterbalancing philosophies. To fester, grow, and ultimately become terminal to a healthy society.

The Oligarchs’ Dinner Party and Zuckerberg’s Hot Mic Reveal

On September 4, Trump summoned more than thirty of the most powerful figures in Silicon Valley to the State Dining Room. At the table: Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Tim Cook (Apple), Satya Nadella (Microsoft), Bill Gates, Sergey Brin and Sundar Pichai (Google), Sam Altman and Greg Brockman (OpenAI), Safra Catz (Oracle), Alex Karp (Palantir), Jensen Huang (NVIDIA), Jeff Bezos (Blue Origin/Amazon), and a procession of other AI and chip executives.

The optics were unmistakable. A long table, microphones set before each oligarch, gold-rimmed plates. The ritual was familiar: like a Trump cabinet meeting, each guest took a turn praising the Leader, pledging billions in “investment,” extolling his “visionary leadership.”

The quotes read like scripted devotionals:

• Sam Altman (OpenAI): “Thank you for being such a pro-business, pro-innovation President. It’s a very refreshing change.”

• Tim Cook (Apple): “Thank you for setting the tone such that we can make a major investment in the United States.”

• Sergey Brin (Google): “It’s an incredible inflection point… that your Administration is supporting our companies instead of fighting with them.”

And the capstone: Mark Zuckerberg, seated right next to Trump, announcing a pledge of “at least $600 billion” in U.S. investment by 2028.

If it felt choreographed, that’s because it was. This was not a negotiation, not even a strategy session. It was performance—the oligarchs lining up to kiss the ring.

A Little Context, Please

To understand what this performance really means, it helps to step back and look at what these oligarchs have already done to America. For that, I turn to Mike Brock—ex-tech exec turned reluctant Cassandra—whose writing at Notes from the Circus cuts with unusual moral clarity.

Here’s Brock, in his essay The Oligarchs’ Dinner Party: How Silicon Valley Toasted American Fascism:

“To understand what these oligarchs have done to America, start with Mark Zuckerberg’s Instagram. His company’s internal research showed the platform was systematically destroying teenage girls’ mental health—creating unprecedented levels of depression, self-harm, and suicide among the most vulnerable users. The data was clear, the causation documented, the human cost undeniable.

Zuckerberg buried the research and continued the optimization.

This isn’t business negligence—it’s systematic cruelty disguised as innovation. Instagram was designed to extract maximum engagement from teenage minds through carefully engineered addiction, turning the most vulnerable period of human development into a profit center for algorithmic manipulation. The teenage suicide epidemic wasn’t an unfortunate side effect; it was the predictable result of systems optimized for engagement over human welfare.

But Instagram represents something larger: the entire Silicon Valley model of turning human consciousness into commodity. Every platform, every algorithm, every “connection” technology follows the same logic—fragment attention, replace authentic relationship with algorithmic substitutes, optimize human behavior for extraction rather than flourishing.

Tim Cook’s Apple markets privacy protection while building surveillance infrastructure for authoritarian regimes. Satya Nadella’s Microsoft promises AI enhancement while developing predictive policing systems that target communities for algorithmic enforcement. Each oligarch represents a variation on the same theme: technological sophistication serving moral barbarism, innovation rhetoric disguising systematic dehumanization.”

I can’t say it any better than that. These men and women didn’t walk into the White House as neutral technologists. They walked in as the architects of an extraction economy that commodifies our attention, monetizes our despair, and treats human vulnerability as an opportunity for profit. Yes, I know that’s very cynical, but when histories of this era are written a couple of centuries from now —assuming humanity survives and histories are still being written—I believe Brock has identified the central key feature of this era. The only question is whether humanity fully collapses because of it—or some counterforce emerges to defeat or at least mitigate it.

The Hot Mic Reveal

And then came the moment that crystallized everything.

As Zuckerberg delivered his carefully prepared pledge of a $600 billion U.S. investment, a hot mic caught him whispering to Trump.

“Sorry, I wasn’t ready… I wasn’t sure what number you wanted to go with.”

It was awkward. But more than awkward, it was revealing.

Here was the supposed master of the algorithm, the man who built a trillion-dollar empire on predictive precision, fumbling to figure out what number would please Trump. This wasn’t a CEO making a business decision. It was a courtier checking with the king.

Mike Brock nailed the significance in his companion essay The Hot Mic and the Monsters:

“This isn’t business negotiation. This is a courtier asking his king what lies he’d prefer to hear, then delivering them with practiced servility to a public they view as sheep requiring management rather than citizens deserving truth.”

The hot mic stripped away the theater. It revealed the truth: the oligarchs weren’t there to shape policy. They were there to play their part in legitimizing authoritarianism through performance.

Conclusion

What we saw in the State Dining Room was not business as usual. It wasn’t “innovation,” it wasn’t “visionary leadership,” and it sure as hell wasn’t patriotism. It was a court of oligarchs kneeling before an aspiring autocrat, pledging riches and obedience in exchange for protection and privilege.

The spectacle was obscene: billionaires who’ve built fortunes by monetizing despair now rushing to sanctify the man who has turned constitutional vandalism into performance art. Zuckerberg’s hot mic didn’t just reveal stage fright — it exposed the truth of the whole evening: this was theater, not policy; flattery, not leadership; a ritual of submission masquerading as a summit of visionaries.

Mike Brock captured it with precision:

“What the hot mic moment exposes is the elaborate theater that authoritarian consolidation requires to maintain legitimacy while systematic plunder proceeds.”

That’s the point. These men aren’t independent actors shaping the future. They are props in a reality show where Trump plays Dear Leader and the oligarchs play sycophants, helping to launder authoritarianism through the language of “innovation” and “investment.”

Every once in a while, a moment cuts through the fog and shows us the rot for what it is. The Oligarchs’ Dinner Party was one of those moments — a gaudy, gold-plated warning flare. We should not look away, and we should not forget who stood at that table and kissed the ring.

by Michael D. Sellers, Deeper Look |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Be sure to visit Mike Brock's site for the original posts (and more): The Oligarchs’ Dinner Party; and, The Hot Mic and the Monsters (NFtC). See also: The art of the fawn: pouring praise on Trump is latest political phenomenon (Guardian).]

The Gaslighting Spectacular

There's something breathtakingly audacious about Donald Trump—yet unsurprising—going on Fox & Friends to justify right-wing extremism while blaming "radicals on the left" for political violence.

“The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don't want to see crime,” Trump explained, as if systematic constitutional destruction and threats to militarize American cities represent merely vigorous opposition to petty theft. “They don't want you burning our shopping centers; they don't want you shooting our people in the middle of the street.” One can only admire the exquisite inversion: the man who posts AI-generated memes threatening military assault on Chicago now positions himself as the voice of peaceful law and order.

Meanwhile, Utah Governor Spencer Cox—clearly suffering from the unfortunate delusion that adults should act like adults during national crises—made an emotional appeal for Americans to “lower the political temperature” and declared social media “a cancer in our society.” The irony of delivering this message while flanked by Kash Patel, whose own social media obsession has turned federal law enforcement into click-bait content creation, apparently escaped no one except Patel himself.

The cognitive dissonance required to maintain Trump's position would be impressive if it weren't so dangerous. The same movement that spent months minimizing January 6th as a minor disturbance, dismissing Charlottesville as isolated extremism, and spreading conspiracy theories about the assassination of Democratic legislators in Minnesota now presents itself as the victim of dangerous left-wing rhetoric following Charlie Kirk's murder.

But here's what makes the gaslighting particularly spectacular: Kirk himself spent years engaging in exactly the kind of rhetoric that Trump now claims is exclusively a left-wing problem. Kirk mocked the attack on Paul Pelosi, promoted conspiracy theories about the Minnesota legislative assassinations being false flag operations, and built his entire brand around the kind of eliminationist rhetoric that treats political opponents as existential enemies requiring destruction rather than fellow citizens requiring persuasion.

The man who made light of an elderly man being attacked with a hammer in his own home is now being martyred as a victim of the very political toxicity he helped create and amplify. The irony would be delicious if it weren't soaked in blood.

Trump's justification of right-wing extremism—"they're radical because they don't want to see crime"—represents the classic authoritarian move of treating systematic constitutional destruction as law enforcement, military deployment against cities as crime prevention, and elimination of democratic constraints as necessary security measures. When your definition of "crime" includes democratic opposition to authoritarian rule, then opposing crime becomes indistinguishable from supporting authoritarianism.

This is how authoritarians eliminate moral categories: by redefining violence as peace, oppression as liberation, and systematic criminality as law enforcement. When Trump claims unlimited authority to execute suspected drug traffickers without trial, that's not crime prevention. It's state-sponsored murder. When he deploys military forces against American cities, he's not fighting crime—he's committing constitutional violations that would make the Founders reach for their muskets.

But the most insidious aspect of the gaslighting is how it weaponizes Kirk's assassination to silence criticism of the very authoritarianism that creates conditions where political violence becomes inevitable. They want his death to function as proof that accurately describing Trump's systematic constitutional destruction somehow causes violence against conservatives.

This is precisely backwards: political violence becomes more likely when democratic alternatives get systematically eliminated, when constitutional constraints disappear, when peaceful opposition gets criminalized through immunity doctrines and weaponized federal agencies. Trump's destruction of democratic institutions doesn't prevent political violence—it makes political violence the only remaining form of political expression for people desperate enough to use it.

The same authoritarian consolidation that threatens democratic governance also creates the instability that makes assassination attempts against political figures from all directions more likely. When you eliminate legal accountability, democratic oversight, and constitutional constraints, you create exactly the kind of chaos where desperate actors turn to violence because systematic alternatives have been destroyed.

Trump's response to Kirk's assassination—justifying right-wing extremism while blaming left-wing rhetoric—reveals the complete moral bankruptcy of the MAGA movement. They want to use Kirk's death to silence their critics while ramping up the very authoritarian behavior that makes more political violence inevitable.

by Mike Brock, Notes From the Circus |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. See also: The 35% Answer:What to do when a Third of Your Country Lives in a Weird Fantasy (TER):]

***

Democracy only works if we can agree on what happened. Not what it means, just what actually happened. We can debate whether a war was justified. We can't debate whether it occurred.

That basic requirement is now broken. (...)

When someone claims Trump reduced the deficit, they're not just wrong about economic policy. They're wrong about reality. He added $7.8 trillion to it. When they claim crime is at record highs, they're denying FBI statistics showing violent crime near its lowest levels since the early 1970s. When they believe a billionaire who gold-plates his toilets actually cares about working families, they're living in a fantasy where a man who stiffed his own contractors for decades is somehow their champion.

This isn't a difference of perspective. It's a rejection of reality itself.

For democracy to function, people need to share basic facts even when they disagree about everything else. We need to agree that unemployment is either 4% or it isn't. That a hurricane either hit Florida or it didn't. That elections are valid when people you don't like win, not just when your team wins.

That agreement no longer exists.

Through a combination of social media algorithms, deliberate propaganda, and partisan news ecosystems, roughly a third of the country has moved to a different dimension. In their dimension, some argue that dragons are real but dinosaurs are fake. Climate change is a hoax but weather control machines exist. The moon landing was staged but JFK Jr. is coming back. And at the center of it all, a man who cheated on all three wives and called American war heroes "losers" is actually a noble patriot who loves his country and is just misunderstood by everyone who's mean to him.

They believe a man who wouldn't rent to Black families genuinely cares about them. A man who mocked a disabled reporter is their champion. A casino owner who bankrupted casinos is their business genius. They donate their last dollars to defend a billionaire who wouldn't let them set foot in Mar-a-Lago. It's like believing in Santa Claus, except Santa Claus at least gives presents to children instead of taking their parents' Social Security.

The comfortable liberal assumption is that this is an information problem. If we just fact-check harder, teach media literacy, or find the right messenger, people will come around to reality.

This is delusional.

These Americans aren't confused. They've chosen a story that feels true over facts that don't. Everyone has access to the same internet. The FBI crime statistics, deficit numbers, vote counts, death rates, Trump's actual business history, his documented lies, it's all right there. But millions have decided that all of this is fake while anonymous posts about microchips in your flu shot and Trump's secret genius reveal hidden truths.

You can't educate people out of beliefs they didn't reason themselves into.